Devlin Brown at the water cooler: When skipping training is good for you

What do you think of skipping? You have never mentioned it — do you skip?

I contemplate skipping a workout at least once a week. In fact, when the going gets tough, I consider myself a master at finding rational arguments to support skipping a session. Funny, stress and work commitments often intensify on leg day.

That being said, the Water Cooler is well aware that you are referring to the act of skipping. Jumping rope is an iconic exercise. We all remember the Rocky scenes. I can tell you that when I was training Muay Thai and kick-boxing, skipping happened every single session. 

A few years ago, while spending time with a world champion boxer, it became clear to me that along with “roadwork”, which means running, skipping was another important tool in building his impressive fitness and conditioning.

We all know this. Crossfitters and fitluencers post videos of impressive skipping, beads of sweat carefully captured in filtered content that racks up likes and comments. And so, I was surprised to stumble on a new study recently that was set up to confirm whether skipping was an effective cardio workout.

Are people bored? Surely we know it is an effective cardio workout? However, knowing and proving are two different things, and when there’s budget to burn, I say burn it. I would, though, I am South African. And so, the clever people proved it and published their study. Skipping makes you fit. More on that in a bit. 

Beyond working up a sweat, skipping is also effective at humbling you if you haven’t done it in a while and if you are not careful, you can tangle up your feet and end up face down, or up, and hurt yourself. The Water Cooler is known for its wit and infallible memory, and we can confirm that over the years, skipping has been spoken about in this column. 

Careful with the assumptions! It’s the era we live in — one will often stumble on a crisis on social media where a user loudly proclaims, “the media is silent, it never talks about it”, and then you visit reputable news sites and it’s been the lead story for days. Facts are no longer a safe hedge, they’re losing their value as a commodity. The other night, when there was no load-shedding, I landed at Lanseria and drove 23km to my house. Three traffic lights worked. There was a lot of skipping going on that night. 

The skipping study, which was recently published in European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, investigates the effect of high-intensity interval skipping and moderate-intensity skipping on cardiorespiratory fitness and body composition. In a world obsessed with how we look, people often confuse body composition with “fitness”. They’re not the same thing.

The findings of the study, which took place in Thailand in 2022, were published in February of this year. Fifty-nine young adults were randomly assigned to high-intensity and moderate continuous intensity skipping groups for eight weeks. Those doing high-intensity interval training did so for three days a week, and those training at a moderate intensity exercised five days a week. 

At the end of the trial, it was found that both the moderate and high-intensity groups showed significantly improved cardiorespiratory fitness — a marked improvement on their pretest levels. Body composition did not differ among or within groups. Perhaps most importantly, they all enjoyed the exercise, with no difference in fun between the groups.

Skipping is an effective way of improving your fitness if it is something your body allows. A study in the US in 2019 found that skipping has a substantially lower impact on your body than running, with a 30% higher anabolic cost. This means that if the joint loads of running cause you to suffer injuries, skipping may be an attractive option.

All it requires is a rope. It is accessible to many people. You can add skipping to any routine to increase your cardio, or do it at home when you have 20 minutes to spare. If you enjoy it, or if you don’t, give it a skip.